Today (April, 10), we’ve made the difficult decision to change the direction of our distro.

While Cinnamon is a great user interface and we’ve had a lot of fun implementing it, it’s become too much a burden to maintain/update going forward. We’d like to remain faithful and compatible to our parent distro, Arch Linux, and further support of Cinnamon would strain that by causing incompatibilities/hacks in the entirety of the Gnome packageset. It is almost impossible to maintain software developed by Linux Mint in a rolling release as we are. They’re 1 year behind with upstream code. Arch Linux is going to have soon Gnome 3.8 and Cinnamon is not compatible with it. The Cinnamon team still have to migrate some of their tools to fully work with Gnome 3.6.

That said, we’ve decided that in order to deliver the most stable, best out-of-the-box user experience possible, that we’ll now be using Gnome as our default desktop environment going forward. We know this decision may upset some of our loyal users, but truly feel it is the best path forward for long term support/maintainability.

In light of this decision, keeping the name Cinnarch could seem misleading. So, we are asking the community what do you think about changing our name. Should we change it or keep Cinnarch?

We still have the same great team behind us, so are confident that we can work through this to create a truly great, easy to use Gnome based distro!

We’d like to thank everyone for their support so far, and like to promise you an exciting new Gnome release coming up soon. We are also hoping to hear your favorite gnome extensions, configuration options, etc. for consideration of being preconfigured for you in our next release.

Also, thinking about the future, we’re gonna give the user the choice of selecting his favourite Desktop Environment while installing.

Please, if you have any productive comments, suggestions, or feedback regarding our transition, please contact us at info@cinnarch.com or post in our forums.

Yesterday was the last day that Cinnarch released with that name. They are now looking for a new name that will identify their new GNOME Desktop.

Sane decision by Cinnarch devs, though I wonder why one would not use pure Arch Linux + GNOME instead now.

Regarding Cinnamon, I always felt it would have been better to be realized as an extension to GNOME Shell as it once was. Maybe then it wouldn’t have problems catching up with upstream development whilist playing along nicely with existing GNOME components. I would like to imagine an ideal situation where Cinnamon – completely realized as a bunch of extensions – is one of the options alongside GNOME (classic) which you can select from GDM. Who knows what the future will bring?

Manolito

With mutter and gs forked and taking a different direction, too much work have to be done to develop cinnamon and also mantain gnome release parity. I think they are too busy right now with the different mint flavors to catch up gnome (as far I know, mint isn’t rolling release and it can’t follow the arch’s packages launch speed, I think).

Brian Bentsen

Compare the new gnome-shell classic session with Cinnamon 1.6.7 and you’ll see why that isn’t possible at all. Cinnamon is too different from gnome-shell now, and it goes deeper than merely the shell.

Brett Legree

One thing that does appeal to me is the installer on the live image.

I do know how to install Arch “the right way” or whatever people want to call it, but I am busy and sometimes I don’t want to do that. I tend to go through machines a lot, and so on, and want to recommend a good rolling release that is still relatively easy to install.

Hey, I like to grind my own coffee beans but I don’t want to have to drive to Columbia to pick them up, then drive back and roast them myself :)

alex285

Download Coffee_Beans_x64. No need to drive anywhere ;)

http://www.facebook.com/brett.legree Brett Legree

Hah! Good one alex285 :-)

Narendiran

Good decision by cinnarch devs. The arch devs are considering dropping cinnamon from their official repos when gnome 3.8 goes stable. It looks like maintaining cinnamon is a big trouble.

Yes but this can apply to GNOME as well. To quote Pamela Jones of Groklaw;

I’m tired of Microsoft throwing tacks in the every competitor’s roadway.
They’ve been doing this as long as I can remember. You want to know why
hardly anyone buys their mobile products? I can tell you. I went to see
them at BestBuy over the weekend and tried out the laptops with Windows
8 on them and looked at the phones, Nokia’s. People don’t like them
because they are annoying. They are hard to figure out, the laptops
especially, and they are ugly. Yes. I said it. They are. And, to me,
it’s unbearable to have the tiles constantly changing. I’d never, ever
buy them. Microsoft’s chief advantage was familiarity. And they went and
designed it away.

It’s the last line that is important:

Microsoft’s chief advantage was familiarity. And they went and
designed it away.

Always something to keep front and center. Change is good but too much change and removal of familiar in short time frames is not.

sramkrishna

We are picking up momentum with each release.

http://twitter.com/vicparragarcia Víc Asecas

So at least this is like a ‘gnome version of chakra Linux’? I vote yes!

Ti-Paul

+1… I’m actually a Chakra user… it just works so well, never encountered problem update after update (rolling).

But i’m a Gnome affectionado… So an easy Arch Gnome variant is VERY welcomed!

Marcos V.F.

Finally a good distro with gnome focus. I will try it!

http://profiles.google.com/bwat47 Brandon Watkins

fedora is good!

Matthew Javelet

I didn’t see this coming. Forking gnome 3 from so early on was stupid on the developers part. A half baked idea sent unto the masses just to gain users who weren’t happy with Gnome 3. Let’s keep dropping this crappy DE.

goldspy

Oddly as it may sound I saw this coming from the very beginning and even warned mint devs such as clem about it. I still have irc logs where I discussed how much of a smack in the face it was to not put any efforts towards improving GS but instead they thwarted efforts and further tarnished their own reputation. Mint has constantly jumped from 1 de to another between releases. The reason they can’t make their mind up, because it isn’t about whats actually going to work down the road, it’s about what their user base wants atm, nothing more. Mint is nothing more than a modern day Windows 3.1.